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2 Responses to “Pardon Our Technical Difficulties”

1. carl Says:
   December 20th, 2014 at 4:26 pm

   I am putting this comment here because the previous comment it is related to, that of the fight against Daesh being a no quarter war, seems to have disappeared.
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   Here are two recent items from the WSJ. The first is from the Dec 6-7, 2014 issue and quotes Ahmend al-Zamili, an Iraqi Shiite militia leader as saying about Daesh members “We see them, we attack them, we get the weapons from them, we talk to them, we get their confessions, and then we kill them,”…”Of course, this is much better than the army strategy.”
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   The second is from the Dec 10, 2014 issue and quotes Sheikh Dhaher Badewi, an Iraqi Sunni tribal leader, as saying of Daesh members “This is a tribal issue for us right now. There’s no way to let them live,”…”I’m not going to leave any of them alive. It’s them, their family members and all their property. We’re going to destroy them all.”
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   These are comments are important in that these are the kind of guys who are going to be doing the face to face fighting against Daesh. I am guessing they are typical of anybody who fights Daesh with rifles and grenades. And these are the guys we are going to have to support with training, weapons and airstrikes if Daesh is to be destroyed. This is something I still don’t think we have worked out for ourselves-we need these guys, we have to support these guys and we won’t get them to soften their attitude toward Daesh.
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   Now combine the above with the recent Taliban atrocity in Pakistan. They didn’t go after the Pak Army/ISI directly. They went after their children. They went after that which is most valued and that which may provoke the most savage of responses (though even this might not change the Pak Army/ISI strategy of creating and trying to use Jihadi monsters).
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   Now all these things taken together indicate to me that forces of violent and literal Koranic interpretation want a no quarter war. They want the fight to be the most savage and cruel they can make it. There is probably some reason in this, terror to subdue opposition, but Dexter Filkins commented that the killing is as important to them as anything. I think he’s right. They want the savagery, the cruelty, the merciless killing for the thrill of it. We haven’t really confronted anything quite and precisely like this before.

2. Charles Cameron Says:
   December 20th, 2014 at 6:44 pm

   Thanks, Carl.
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   That’s a very useful supplement to our earlier discussion. I have .pdfs of many of those missing discussions, but no way to index their contents. With any luck, we’ll be able to restore the originals one of these days.